Deviant Cartesianism

In doing some looking for the causes of all the bad things associated with modernity, and an alternative narrative to that offered by Brad S. Gregory, for instance, I came across some references in Richard A. Muller’s Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics of some relevance. On the philosophical and scholastic side of things, there was a breakdown of the general (eclectic and diverse within its unity) Christian Aristotelianism or peripateticism.

Thus, writes Muller, after 1725 Protestant orthodoxy was “increasingly influenced by various schools of rationalist philosophy” (PRRD 1:82). As the eighteenth century progressed, a reversal occurred in which the preeminence of confessional orthodox theology was replaced in intellectual and scholastic life with various rationalist and heterodox philosophical approaches. Muller contends that it is “the Cartesian model that, in its more extreme forms, elevated reason over revelation,” and that “in some cases, led to a departure from the balance of revelation and reason characteristic of the theology allied to the traditional Christian Aristotelianism” (PRRD 4:401).